Dreams

I dream a lot.

Most nights, I wake up three or four times a night. Almost every time I wake up, I wake up from a dream. Most nights, I also remember my dreams - at least one, sometimes two. I've heard that people aren't supposed to be able to remember more than one dream a night, but I'm pretty sure that I have. It's just hard to tell....

The problem is that it's very hard to explain a dream, much less write down the specifics. What seems perfectly normal in a dream can make absolutely no sense when you try to explain it to someone else. I can move from room to room in buildings that are completely unrelated and place to place without any form of transportation, and it works in the dream. It flows. But when I try to talk about what happened, or write down the details, it suddenly makes no sense or I stop being able to remember the details.

My father has been studying neuroscience for many years. I'm sure he could explain what is happening at a physical level. But here's what I think is happening.

I think that, once you start trying to describe a dream, your brain/mind tries to impose logic and rational thinking on what you are trying to explain. It tries to relate what happened to what it knows - the real world. Which of course is not where dreams happen. So a couple of things happen all at once. You lose the train of the irrational things that happened in your dream. And the details fall apart because your mind can't get them to relate to each other and the more you try to hold onto them, the more they dissolve.

For example, the other night I had a dream about a friend of mine who died a few years ago. In my dream, I was having a normal conversation with this friend and he was telling me about his childhood. But the conversation seemed to be happening in a parallel universe from the universe I normally lived in because in my mind, as I was listening to him talk to me, I knew that he had died. He was telling me how, as a kid, he had had stomach surgery. He showed me the scar. He told me that, although the scar sometime caused him pain, it was a good thing that he had the surgery. And in my mind, I started thinking that the fact that he had had stomach surgery, in this life, meant that he wouldn't develop cancer. Or maybe he would. It wasn't clear in the dream nor in my memory of the dream. Either way, I was trying to figure out how to tell him that I knew he was going to develop cancer.

But the really weird part is not the parallel universe. Or that I knew that my friend had died. Or that I thought the surgery might mean he wouldn't get cancer. It was that the cancer that killed him wasn't stomach cancer.